Just Jim Dale

Best known as the amorous Carry On medic, born entertainer Jim Dale has still got it, as this show reveals
Richard-Barber-colour-176If the wave of warmth that greeted his arrival on stage is any gauge of his popularity, Jim Dale’s one-man show should be a sell-out in its short season at the Vaudeville. Here is Renaissance man, singing, dancing and telling jokes for two hours.

And didn’t the audience lap it up! Roy Hudd, Siân Phillips, Derek Jacobi, Robert Lindsay, Bonnie Langford, Ronald Pickup and, of course, Barbara Windsor – all of them were there cheering Jim to the echo. I also spotted Kenneth Branagh, but then he’s due to revive the role of Archie Rice next year in a new production of John Osborne’s The Entertainer, and Rice, like Dale, clipped the dying days of music hall.

This is an evening rich in anecdote, but then this has been a career rich in its diversity. Just consider the man’s CV. From his humble beginnings in the small Northamptonshire town of Rothwell (‘Dead in the centre of England,’ says Jim, ‘and I do mean dead’), his parents had the vision to send him to dancing classes aged nine, the only boy in a class of girls. ‘I was the Billy Elliot of my era.’

Comedy routines in music hall (14 shows a week for two years solid) led to a brief career as a pop singer on legendary shows such as Six-Five Special, songwriting – he penned the lyrics to the chart-topping Georgy Girl (who knew?) – and, of course, roles in 11 Carry On films, including the stethoscopewielding Dr James Nookey. Then came legit theatre at the National, starring roles on Broadway in shows such as Barnum and Me And My Girl, and renewed fame as the narrator of all seven Harry Potter audiobooks for the US market (he is now a US citizen, and lives in New York with his second wife).

Woven into the show too – as if further proof of his versatility were needed – are a bittersweet speech from a Noël Coward play and the pre-curtain opening words from Peter Nichols’s A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg, in which he appeared in New York.

Accompanied on piano throughout by the cheerful Mark York, a man who happily chuckles at each joke as if heard for the first time, Dale is a master of comic timing and a lithe and limber dancer, whose silken movements and India-rubber body language belie the fact that he’ll turn 80 in August.

If it’s sometimes slightly old-fashioned at the edges, well, perhaps that’s to be expected. A lovely, gentle evening in the company of a lovely, gentle man.

Until 20 June at The Vaudeville Theatre, Strand, London WC2: 0844-482 9675, www.justjimdale.com